A platform for hosting voice applications is realized by a collection of voice application scripts, browsers and resources. A useful class of voice applications is interactive voice response (“IVR”). IVR is a technology that automates interaction with telephone callers. Enterprises are increasingly turning to IVR to reduce the cost of common sales, service, collections, inquiry and support calls to and from their company.
IVR is one example of what is generally referred to as a self-help application. In the voice context, a self-help application is referred to as IVR.
Historically, IVR solutions have used pre-recorded voice prompts and menus to present information and options to callers, and touch-tone telephone keypad entry to gather responses. Modern IVR solutions also enable input and responses to be gathered via spoken words with voice recognition.
IVR solutions enable users to retrieve information including bank balances, flight schedules, product details, order status, movie show times, and more from any telephone. Additionally, IVR solutions are increasingly used to place outbound calls to deliver or gather information for appointments, past due bills, and other time critical events and activities.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,496,054 discloses telephony platform for hosting voice applications. The entire disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 7,496,054 is incorporated herein by reference. In such a platform, a voice application is selected by a dialed number and executed by a browser while employing selected application resources. Examples of resources include ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), TTS (Text to Speech), media servers, proxy servers, etc.
Prior art systems typically either have the selection of the application resources predefined or necessarily based on the availability of the resource in question. The predefined selection often amounts to simply selecting a given physical service center, with a preconfigured, localized set of browsers and resources. For example, IVR servers traditionally have their resources (such as ASR, TTS, media, or proxy servers) configured in static configuration sources such as xml files or other such media with very limited support for dynamic selection of resources.
Thus, it is desirable to have a self-help application platform free from the above-mentioned limitations.